Global climate change and coastal brownfield redevelopment are two subjects that on the surface don’t play well together.

But a group of University of Michigan graduate students, including four from its School of Natural Resources and Environment ( SNRE ), have come up with an award-winning strategy. Their proposal calls for linking the subjects with a glue: a planning and design concept known as “resilience.”

The students’ interdisciplinary work was produced in the fall for the course “NRE 576/UP 576: Applying Landscape Ecological Design to Brownfield Redevelopment.” Joan Nassauer, a professor of Landscape Architecture at SNRE, developed and taught the course, which received significant support in 2007 from the Graham Environmental Sustainability Institute, Lubert-Adler, Antares Real Estate and their partners in Stamford, Conn. Each interdisciplinary team in the course developed its own focus for proposing an alternative scenario for a 220-acre brownfield redevelopment site on the South End of Stamford.

Members of the winning team are: Jeffrey Carey, College of Engineering; M’Lis Bartlett, Amy Beltamacchi and Amy Kludt, landscape architecture ( SNRE ); Sarah Levy, environmental policy ( SNRE ); and Stacey Braverman, Law School. The title of their winning project is “Building Resilience: Remediation Options for Minimizing Risk on Coastal Brownfield Development in light of Global Climate Change.”